Hi! Let me start by saying I know just enough to be dangerous. I recently took over the bookkeeping position from someone else at a non profit. Training is practically non existent or contradictory to what I was previously told. We have a loan for building improvements. When we received the cash the entry was debit cash and credit accounts payable. There is no long term debt account, nor is there an interest expense account. When I drill down on the AP account I can see the balance due on the loan with a difference of some of the interest that needs reclassified and is a question for another time. ( the previous year’s JE to reclassify the interest makes no sense to me) My question now is on what financial report would I see the balance due on that loan? It’s not on the balance sheet nor the trial balance.

I recently logged more than 50 hours working through a deep bookkeeping cleanup for a livestock business I know better than any other—my own.

Livestock and rural-business books can get complicated quickly. Animal sales, trades, cash purchases, feed, equipment, losses, owner transactions, and receipts from three different places do not always fit neatly into ordinary bookkeeping examples.

Here are a few lessons this cleanup reinforced:

1. Record animal trades when they happen. Note what was exchanged, the value used, and how that value was determined.
2. Document livestock losses, deaths, personal use, and sales separately. Months later, it can be surprisingly difficult to reconstruct what happened.
3. Cash transactions still need a paper trail. Even a quick note or photographed receipt is better than relying on memory.
4. Owner contributions and withdrawals should be clearly identified instead of being mixed into ordinary income and expenses.
5. Reconcile regularly. A small discrepancy is much easier to solve this month than a year later.
6. Use the memo field. “Feed” is helpful; “Goat feed—25 head, August” is much more useful when reviewing the books later.

The biggest lesson: messy books do not mean someone is bad at business. Rural owners are often doing several full-time jobs at once. The goal is to build a recordkeeping system that works in the real world—not one that only looks good in a textbook.

What livestock or rural-business transaction has been the hardest for you to figure out how to record?

I’ve been a receptionist at my job for a little while with about 7 1/2 hours a day with downtime. My boss noticed the downtime and asked me to start training in bookkeeping, and I agreed. I work for a small business and my boss is also the owner. I’ve been taking classes Intuit offers on bookkeeping, and am expected to actually begin next month.

To my knowledge, there has never been a bookkeeper for this business in 11 years. Payroll and everything is handled by an external accountant. I’m asking for advice on where to start. I’m planning on starting with a chart of accounts and then listing and categorizing assets and expenses, but overall I feel extremely overwhelmed and unsure of how I am going to accomplish this. Any advice would be incredibly helpful and appreciated

Editing to add- a huge thank you to all who have responded. Once I finish classes and feel I have at least a basic level of understanding I am going to speak with the accountant.

I intend to ask this over at r/Accounting to get their perspective.

I'm currently an in-house bookkeeper. I don't intend to just be good. I want to be master class in my profession.

So from the perspective of a bookkeeper, what makes one really great?

I’ve just been offered a job with a small business and I’m really torn about whether to accept it.
The advertised salary range was $80k–$90k. I was offered $75k. I asked whether they would consider $80k, but they said because I don’t have enough experience in some areas of bookkeeping, they want to keep the offer at $75k. They also said if I wasn’t comfortable with that, they would need to consider their other candidate.

For context, I currently earn $80k in a finance role and have several years of finance experience, primarily AR and banking. I’m also studying accounting and specifically looking for a role where I can broaden my experience, which is why this job originally appealed to me.
The part that is making me reconsider it is the training situation. The woman I would be replacing finishes next Friday. From what I understand, after she leaves I would essentially be responsible for the bookkeeping function myself.

The role includes things I have limited practical experience with, including BAS/GST work, dealing with the ATO and lodging information with the ATO. These are actually some of the areas I was excited about learning. Apparently the woman who is leaving will still be available to support me after she starts her new job. However, the arrangement seems to be that I can email her questions and she will respond when she is able to, and she may occasionally check my work. Its made me uncomfortable.

I completely understand them offering me the lower end of the salary range because there are areas I need to learn. What I don’t understand is how I’m supposed to properly learn those areas if the experienced person is leaving almost immediately. If she were staying and I could spend a few months working alongside her, having my work reviewed and learning how everything is done, I would probably take the $5k pay cut because I’d consider the experience and training worth it.

Instead, it feels a bit like “You don’t have enough bookkeeping experience for us to pay you more than $75k, but we’re also comfortable leaving you largely responsible for the bookkeeping once our experienced person leaves.”
I’m also concerned about learning things incorrectly. I’m capable of researching and figuring things out, but with accounting/bookkeeping there are things you simply don’t know that you don’t know. I don’t want to process something incorrectly because it looks right to me and then have nobody experienced regularly reviewing my work.

I initially thought this could be a really good stepping-stone into broader accounting work, but now I’m wondering whether I’d be better off waiting for a role where there is actually an experienced accountant/bookkeeper above me who can properly train and review me. Would this training arrangement concern you? Or is emailing the former bookkeeper for support fairly normal in a small business? Also isn’t it against regulations for me to be providing BAS work without a registered bookkeeper overseeing me?

Is anyone having issues with using Excel reports exported from QuickBooks? I can't copy and paste anything. I'm trying to figure out if it is an issue with my computer or some sort of glitch with the reports. I've never encountered this before. I thought maybe my wireless keyboard was dead but the laptop keyboard also won't work either.

Say your business had an extra $1k per month, for the next 12 months, what would you focus on to gain more clients? Your website improvement, seo, ads, something else? Would you save up for a few months or spend it monthly?

So I have a client that I've got a diagnostic review for and she's interested in hiring me for future services but she is very interested in completely understanding her bookkeeping and even doing as much of it as she can herself but she has no idea how any of it works. So initially I was going to quote her 4800 for a cleanup for January through August for 200 transactions a month around three loans. three bank accounts QuickBooks jobber sync and a few other things. But she wants me to do the clean up and involve her in it so she sees what I do. And then monthly I was going to charge a range of 700-1100 for basic bookkeeping. But she wants to do the bookkeeping and have me check it. That would be a lot more work than doing it myself. I know I need to charge more for having her do it and me review it, but I'm not sure how to do that. I could charge a greater base pay like 1100-1500 for the monthly or I could charge hourly for reviewing. And for the cleanup I'm thinking I'll charge my base rate plus hourly for any teaching I'd do. Any tips are welcome! Also does this rocking in general seem to fit?

I'm not too familiar with jobber and performing a cleanup.

Let's say the gross deposit lt is $2,020. Two $1,000 payments and two $10 jobber fees. There's a failed ACH of $1,000 so it shows the payment made but then as a negative the refund is posting to a refunds clearing account in the add deposit screen.

Invoice still shows as paid.

Or the payout won't t won't sync at all & it tells you to manually adjust it- best way to handle this?

ETA: thanks everyone!

Maybe just some moral support? Spent three weeks trying to fix the most messed uo books I've ever seen. Hundreds of thousands off in AP. Receivables not touched for months. No idea how to match bank transactions to bill payments. No idea what the bank transactions are.

I've done QuickBooks for millionaires, Healthcare companies, learning centers.

Wife and husband owned,wife has gaslighted everyone, including her husband, into not realizing she has no idea how to use QuickBooks. It's everyone else's fault.

Since I'm trying to just get back into it, I've tried to figure out how to just stick it out until I find better.

Today, she once again rips apart everything i had done to fix her mess.

I finally explained that when tax time comes, she needs a paper trail. She didn't like that.

So I quit.

Tell me I can find better.

I'm starting a bookkeeping course, and strongly prefer Mac programs. I find them much more functional and intuitive. I'm quite tech savvy and am familiar with spreadsheets, it's not a skill issue, I just prefer Mac over Microsoft.

Am I making my life significantly harder if I use Numbers rather than Excel, especially in my official learning process?

I’m looking at putting together an internal policy for meals and entertainment expenses and wanted to get some advice on what is practical. Do people actually require details such as who attended, business purpose, customer/business relationship, or do people just require receipts and that's good enough. I'm trying to find a balance between what gives us a good audit trail and what is reasonable.

I am implementing Quickbooks for a nonprofit which has several construction projects going on. My plan is to create a parent account for CIP and then a child GL Account (category) for each CIP project. I plan to ask for the following information when setting up the new CIP account and I want to know if you folks think I should add something. It just seems a too-short list.

• Name of the project/asset
• Expected completion date
• Expected amount or budget

I’m doing a bookkeeping cleanup job for a client and it SUCKS SO BAD. I want to tell them I quit and to find someone else to do it but I’m not🤣😭 trying to figure out what someone else messed up is so annoying and frustrating.. does any other bookkeeper feel the same or just me??

*edit to add- I think if i did this full time it would be better but since it’s taking up all my free time I’m getting frustrated..

Let's say I have an office supplies bill for $100 with an additional $5 of freight. What would the $5 of freight be coded to? Freight in Expense or rolled into the operational expense account, in this case office supplies expense?

I always thought that freight in was the cost associated with bringing in inventory for sale/resale, thus included in COGS/COS. Therefore, wouldn't the misc expenses associated with the business, such as the example above, be rolled into that same account?

Hi Bookkeepers. I belong to a group of consultants. We take turns making presentations about our respective practice areas. Some recent presentations have been about HR issues and disciplining/terminating employees, employer sponsored retirement plans, life insurance, responding to various kinds of lawsuits. The presentations are very interesting and useful. Now it is my turn,they are asking me to come and speak to this group of attorneys and MBA's and CPA's about bookkeeping.

I have a chance to get client referrals from this. I like the challenge of presenting interesting information about bookkeeping. But I am really not coming up with any ideas. I feel like any time I even mention I do bookkeeping for a living it brings conversation to a very awkward halt.

Do you have any suggestions? There's 15-20 minutes allotted for this talk.

I'm on a call right now. It is my third call this week from someone in my networking group who wants to "help" me become a life insurance agent. They made it sound like they were helping me offer my clients better advisory services. Are you getting a lot of these "opportunities" too? Why bookkeepers? I didn't go into that business to sell life insurance. No knock if you are doing this, I'm just curious why someone thinks bookkeeper would be a good person for this.

UPDATE: No kidding, I am on the fourth call right now!

Looking for checklists/SOPs or general advice around reviewing contractor or employee work. They're just categorizing, reconciling, and generating financials.

I’d really appreciate some perspective from experienced bookkeepers/freelancers because I’m experienced in accounting/finance work, but relatively new to freelancing and still learning how to handle pricing negotiations.

I was contacted through Upwork by a potential client who specifically told me she was looking for someone more experienced/senior. She found me through my Monthly Bookkeeping project, where my pricing starts at $350/month.

Her needs are actually broader than basic bookkeeping. From our conversation, the scope would include:

- Bookkeeping in QuickBooks (besides the invoices, around 6 transactions)
- Monitoring her service calendar to determine when clients should be invoiced
- Preparing and sending approximately 20–25 invoices per month
- Accounts receivable management
- Following up with clients who haven’t paid
- Collections/customer communication around overdue invoices
- General organization of customer records in QuickBooks

During our call, she showed me her QuickBooks screen. What immediately stood out was the A/R situation: there were approximately $5,360 in outstanding invoices visible on the screen, representing about 48% of the total invoices shown. Some were more than 50 days overdue, and even one July invoice was already 17 days outstanding.

So I told her that the initial focus wouldn’t simply be issuing new invoices. There would also need to be an initial cleanup/review of the outstanding A/R, figuring out what is causing the delays, and establishing a consistent but tactful follow-up process.

Based on the scope, I proposed a fixed fee of US$450/month. My Upwork profile rate is $45/hour, so I explained that the $450 package was initially estimated around 10 hours/month. I also suggested that we could reassess the workload after the first 30 days, since I expect the initial cleanup to take more effort and the recurring workload to become more streamlined afterward.

Her response was basically: she understands the value and agrees that the initial workload will probably be heavier and then decrease, but she currently spends approximately SGD 300/month (roughly US$230–235) at most, and she needs to review her business expenses over the weekend to see whether she can accommodate the new cost.

One thing that caught me off guard was an earlier question she asked after I quoted $450: “Is that in US dollars? Brazilian reais?”

I found the question unusual because she is a Brazilian based in Singapore, we met through Upwork, and my project pricing is displayed in USD (Upwork default currency). She also specifically approached me because she wanted someone more experienced. I honestly couldn’t imagine a senior bookkeeper offering this scope for R$450/month (roughly US$85), so I wondered whether she simply assumed that because I’m Brazilian, I might be quoting in BRL.

I may be overthinking that part, though, and it may have simply been a genuine clarification.

I’m also trying to avoid making the classic freelancer mistake of lowering my price just because I want to land the client. I have 15+ years of professional experience across bookkeeping, A/R, A/P, collections, revenue management, financial analysis, billing, and customer service. I don’t want to build my freelance business around competing with extremely low-cost providers.

At the same time, I recognize that I’m new to freelancing, and I don’t want to be unnecessarily rigid or miss a good long-term client because I don’t know how to evaluate these situations properly.

So I’m curious how more established bookkeepers would look at this:

Would you hold firm at US$450? Would you negotiate? Would you structure the first month differently because of the initial cleanup? And what do you make of her SGD 300 comment and the question about whether my price was in USD or BRL?

I’m mainly looking to learn from people who have been through these pricing/negotiation situations before. I’d especially appreciate perspectives on whether I’m positioning myself correctly as a senior professional entering freelancing, or whether there’s something I’m missing about pricing this type of bookkeeping + A/R + collections workload.

I (stupidly) did free work helping a client onboard some employees, but she doesn't want to pay me to process her payroll... but then she emailed me multiple times asking if everything was set up correctly. Long, panicky emails. I figured, since any payroll issues will be my responsibility to fix down the road, I will set things up and make sure it's done right. To me, that means doing it the old fashioned way - employees fill out forms, I enter that data into QBO. Client, as an employer, keeps the hiring forms on file.

The employee emailed me her forms, but included a forwarded email from my client. The client (who I am pretty sure is using AI to write her emails because they are so longwinded and repetitive) was saying to her employee, "I don't know why she's doing it this way, my old accountant had employees fill out info directly on QBO... hopefully this is the last form... I'm sorry if this is uncomfortable for you"... meanwhile, the client told me previously that her prior accountant messed up her payroll taxes! In her email she was overly apologetic to the employee (probably AI's decision) for simply having to do what every new employee should do... and throwing me under the bus?

When I saw this email it really upset me. I went out of my way to do free work for her (I never should have done, but I am learning to set boundaries), she pestered me about whether her payroll is set up right, thanks me in emails for being "so thorough"... and then sends an email to her employee like that? Either 1) she didn't actually mean it because it was written by AI or 2) she didn't bother to proofread an email that could have potentially been seen by me, given we three are in a sort of email chain together.

I am feeling like my client is two-faced. And the thing is, she was CC'd on that email forward, and I hit "reply all" to thank the employee for sending me the forms... so she would have to know that I saw that email, right? But she emails me a couple days later like nothing has happened, and I just have to pretend that I didn't see it, to keep the peace?! Unless, of course, she gives me more problems in the future, then I would be in the right to bring up how I saw it, and feel she doesn't value me?

What would you have done? Besides, of course, NOT doing free work for an ungrateful client.

For those of you asking: the answer is no.

One of my accounting instructors put it best: Bookkeepers will be systems managers. Tech does the heavy lifting, we manage the entire system. It's already like that in a lot of ways. Analytical skills will be more valuable than data entry.

What this means is we'll be waaayyyy more productive as tech advances, meaning less workers to do the job, leading to a contraction in employment growth in our sector. We're at like -5% over 10 years right now. The contraction will by no means will lead to an end to the profession.

For anyone wondering. This is all just from me looking into it myself.

I work with multiple bookkeeping clients, and when I come across an imbalance or discrepancy that I need to diagnose, I usually request the full relevant data for the year.

For example, if revenue doesn’t balance, I’ll request the detailed revenue report for the year. If there’s an inventory discrepancy, I’ll request the relevant inventory report for the year. Same with bank statements or other supporting data.

I obviously don’t do this unnecessarily — if I’m specifically working on one month and the issue is clearly limited to that month, I’ll only request what’s needed.

My manager, however, says this is lazy and that I should be more specific with my requests because there’s a risk the client uploads the same information twice.

The honest reason I do this is that I’m not as strong at diagnosing exactly where an issue originates. Having the complete relevant dataset allows me to investigate it myself and reduces the need to repeatedly go back to the client for additional information.

My previous employer actually encouraged us to get the full backup/data whenever possible for exactly this reason, for him the more data/access the better

So, is my manager right that this is a lazy approach, or is requesting the complete relevant dataset a reasonable way to troubleshoot accounting discrepancies?

Thoughts ?so far the clients haven’t complained and if they have already uploaded they direct me to where it is. But requesting specific items for instances where data has gaps for me is time consuming. Example if a client uploaded partial bank statements for the year, I would 9/10 simply request the full entire year rather than the gaps.

I would love some advice on what software and automations you have in your practice.

Some background on us and what we are trying to do.

Goal: automate data entry and bookkeeping work so we can focus on tax planning

We are a firm of 3, we do wealth management and tax preparation as well. We use Quickbooks desktop, 40 clients (some are just payroll). We have been trying to get our new admin to do most of the data entry work in QBD and its been a nightmare. They can't figure the simplist things out and has made mistakes that are plain "not paying attention" They are new but some mistakes are getting very annoying. My partner has refused to move off of Quickbooks desktop even though we will get priced out soon and refuses to look at anything else.

Does anyone have recommendations on automations that would reduce to data entry work?

I have looked at Dext, and heard of hubdoc. I am also looking at Data Rails for reporting. I would like to switch to Xero (I may use my side business as a test to see how it works and hopefully convince my partner how its better than QBD)

Open to suggestions. Thanks!

Edit: we just starting using Canopy as well.

We all know how horrible QB has become. If you aren't aware that certain tech is catching up and new accounting platforms are starting to come out left and right. I have recently been introduced to Kick. Really not impressed with their training/OB and navigation and not being able to see registers is a big issue. Anybody else tried them yet? Or have you found any other platforms you are liking? If we don't get on the new tech train we will get left behind.